


James

by musamihi



Category: Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-12
Updated: 2013-03-12
Packaged: 2017-12-05 01:36:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 775
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/717367
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/musamihi/pseuds/musamihi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mary Morstan's marriage is part of a game.  Unfortunately, her true partner doesn't know when to stop playing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	James

**Author's Note:**

> No doubt Mary Morstan calls her husband "James" because the man writing the story couldn't be bothered to make sure his characters keep the same given name for more than three pages at a time, but I like this explanation better.

When the pearl arrived in the post, Mary sought out Professor James Moriarty. Not because she suspected he knew anything about it - not because he was brilliant, tenacious, and could be trusted to solve the matter - not even because the fact that she spent more nights than not in his company made him a natural source of consolation. She sought him out then for the same reason she'd sought him out years ago: he was a man who understood. He was a mind walled off from other minds by his purity of abstraction, his superiority of reason, his unwillingness to feign concern for that which could never concern him. _She_ was a mind made silent and secret by the constant, crushing gaze of men, a mind hidden behind bleak defenses made necessary by strangling coercion as an enemy army necessitates a fortress. In James' writing and in the substance of his study (which they two alone, she knew, could comprehend) she had seen his solitude and his longing and had recognized a kindred spirit. And so she had gone to him, and stone by stone they had cleared passages into one another.

In this time of troubled memories, when some mysterious person was committing an alarming intrusion into her private past, who else could she allow to share her distress? So she set the pearl on his desk, and voiced her suspicions, and he looked her in the eye and said - with his particular brand of cool gentleness - that he believed he knew of a distraction they'd both find soothing.

***

Sherlock Holmes _was_ distracting - and exhilarating. He was so engaging, in fact, that Mary took it upon herself to devise a foolproof way of keeping him close by. At just the right moment, she clutched the doctor's hand; after a little consideration, she and James decided that the treasure was a small price to pay for unfettered and enduring access to Holmes.

Mary Morstan became Mary Watson. It was easy.

John was so agreeable, so accommodating. His work with Holmes was frequent and time consuming, leaving Mary ample time to spend with the object of her admiration, the subject of her identification. John went away on his adventures and returned to pour them into her ears; she took them in turn to James, and they batted Sherlock Holmes between themselves like a fascinating toy. She kept the two worlds scrupulously separate (stumbling only once, when the late-night appearance of a patient released a delicious torrent of hope that her husband would leave her to her own devices for the night, and she let _James_ slip past her lips instead of _John_ ). The two men were to her work and pleasure, necessity and joy, survival and living. She never found the secret-keeping burdensome. She had been bred to secrets, her private thoughts never having been fit for public inspection. Sharing the truth of herself only with the _one_ she chose would ever be a source of satisfaction, not of frustration. 

She loved the lies as she'd come to rely upon the veil she'd always worn for everyone but James.

***

But James was different. James, in the end, proved susceptible to the temptation Mary had long since learned was a lure without substance or promise. James, perhaps because he was, despite everything, a man, thought he could find fulfillment, completion ( _himself_ ) in another man. And he pursued Sherlock Holmes to his death, breaking himself on his inability to find all he needed within the closed system of his own existence as surely as he broke himself on the rocks at the bottom of the Reichenbachfall. Mary was saddened, but not startled, by his naïveté. He was a man; and men, even when outcast, were always taught that they could reach out and touch, test, take. Mary knew that there was nothing to touch in the first place, nothing another person could truly offer that wasn't better discovered within, but she could never have shared that truth with him.

Still, without James, her arrangement with John held little delight for her. At the earliest opportunity, she arranged for a shattered and unrecognizable corpse to tumble beneath a heavily-loaded cart wearing her clothes and her jewelry. Without Sherlock Holmes, John would believe the lie. John would lose her, to the extent that one could lose what one has never held.

Mary lost nothing, because Mary knew - as she always had - that all anyone ever possesses is herself. She left, crossing the Atlantic without a backward glance, and embarking on a railroad that took her into the stolen wilderness of the American west, where no man ever saw Mary again.


End file.
